


Rose Was Here

by LicieOIC



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Angst, F/M, Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-30
Updated: 2014-01-30
Packaged: 2018-01-10 13:47:43
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 741
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1160413
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LicieOIC/pseuds/LicieOIC
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Eleventh Doctor finds a message Rose left for him long ago.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Rose Was Here

**Author's Note:**

> This was my first non-au story.

After a few decades, he’d forgotten about it.

He’d told her once that he liked a particular shade of lipstick she wore and the smile she’d given him right before he snogged it all off had warmed his hearts. She’d cheekily told him afterward that she thought her lippy looked better on him. In answer, he’d chased after the tongue caught in her teeth.

He’d landed them at the Powell Estate that day, to find that it was Valentine’s Day and Jackie had asked him what he’d bought for her daughter in the way of a gift. He’d fumbled and stuttered until Rose had rescued him, saying he’d given her all of time and space, he didn’t need to do anything as cliche as bring her flowers on a contrived holiday.

"Besides, what could I ever give him in return?" she’d said. "He has everything."

Well, that was correct. He had her. He could measure time in the number of heartbeats she’d made since they met. Really, what more could he want, having her at his side.

Even so, he’d taken her to dinner that night and even paid. She’d been impressed.

The next morning, there was new sticky note on the console with a perfect imprint of her lips in that beautiful shade of lipstick. A scrawled message was below: Rose was here. And it made his hearts skip a few beats.

They still hadn’t said those three special words to each other, coward to the end, that was him, but ‘Rose was here’… It was close. For him, at least. It might as well be written across his soul. ‘Rose was here,’ it said. ‘For all of time and through all of space.’ Her gift to him.

In the time that followed, he kept finding those little notes, kisses with ‘Rose was here’ written across the bottom. On his favorite mug, on his tie rack, on the bottom of a tea tin, on the lapel of one of his suits, on the inside of a book, in his sock drawer, on the milk carton, and once he found one stuck to his specs as he pulled them from his jacket pocket. The little messages would turn up everywhere, in the most unlikely places. He wouldn’t see one for a while and think he’d gotten them all, and then another would turn up.

He hadn’t found one in many years, and for that, he was grateful. The first time he’d stumbled upon one after losing her a second time, inside the lid of a steamer trunk, he’d wept for hours. But he thought he’d gotten them all… He’d had the Tardis track down all sticky notes not written by him and transfer them to the locked drawer in his bedroom, where he’d kept all of them, unwilling to part with a single kiss given to him by his Rose. And after, oh, about a hundred years or so, he’d managed to forget about them, to leave the memories locked in the drawer.

He was with River when it happened. They’d sat down to compare journals and his opened to a page he hadn’t written on yet. There, at the bottom, the imprint of the lips he’d known so well, had mapped so meticulously with his own, and the message.

'Rose was here.'

It wasn’t on a sticky, it was directly on the white paper, so of course, the Tardis hadn’t found it, hadn’t moved it.

He sat there, staring at it, unable to move or speak as his hearts squeezed painfully. River looked up at him, her brow furrowing at his silence.

"What’s wrong?"

He couldn’t tell her about the memories rushing back, each one an arrow straight through him.

At last, he managed to croak out, “I have to go,” and went straight back into the Tardis, flipping the lever to send the ship into the Vortex. He continued to the hall, his journal clutched tight in his hand, as he sought the place he hadn’t dared to visit in over a century.

When he found it, his fingers traced reverently over the carving of the rose on the door before he entered, the pink everywhere just as shocking as the first day the room had appeared. He collapsed on the bed, burying his face in the pillow, where only the memory of her scent remained.

Suddenly, the ‘was’ in her written statement hurt more than it ever had.


End file.
